My view of the world

Phorm, a British company has found a way to make cookies that track every page you visit on the Internet.
These cookies attach themselves to other companies cookies so at the end of the day, they not only know where you’ve been, but how you got there and everything you did while visiting.

All this data is collected in one place instead of being scattered through various companies. — Kind of like an RFID for your computer.

In this country the much bigger company is NebuAD that gets data directly from your ISP, but doesn’t keep any sort of personal information.
According to the CEO of NebuAD:
“We built our system such that, as we map a user over and over again… that mapping is reflected only as a hash number, not as any personally identifiable information, not even an IP address… All we track is that somebody qualified for certain interest categories… We don’t keep the raw data about what searches they did.”

All of this is to serve ads and…… perhaps add to Uncles already massive data collection…… Nah. These companies wouldn’t do that, they gave us their word. After all they must be at least as honest and upright as AT&T or Verizon……….

The are a number of companies that offer reconstruction of shredded documents for a price.
It doesn’t matter if you use a cross cut or a diamond cut shredder they can de-shred your most precious secrets..
(Strip cutters don’t really count as security. Given a table, tape and some patients, anyone can put the document back together.)

ChurchStreet Technology has been doing reconstruction of documents for a number of years.
On a tough job it will probably run you $100 per page.
Given that the average home or office shredder has a bag capacity of between six and ten gallons of small pieces of paper this becomes astronomically expensive.

It’s not the sort of thing you are going to do casually, but if you work at some branch office of an unnamed federal agency or are spying on your business competitor the cost can be justified.

For the do it yourselfers in the crowd there’s unshredder software. A license will set you back $950 plus the specialized paper trays they want to sell you.

If you feel the need to slow the Feds or the competition down, and don’t want to use a policy of shred, burn and flush, get a security level 6 shredder.

While I’ve never done business with the company, Factory Express handles handles a wide variety of level 6 shredders at what appear to be fair prices.

A shredder alone will not stop the FBI, your business partner or future ex-wife from reading your mail, but you can sure as shit make them work for it.

This is from the BBC:

Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests.

The drink has already been linked to a lower risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, and a study by a US team for the Journal of Neuroinflammation may explain why.

A vital barrier between the brain and the main blood supply of rabbits fed a fat-rich diet was protected in those given a caffeine supplement.

This is an interesting read. If their theory is correct I should have no problems with my brain. But at a minimum of 1 pot of coffee a day I’ll probably die from the side effects of drinking that much caffeine.

I purchased a new color printer yesterday, it’s an HP D7460. The little HP 1020 I had been using would only print in B&W. —-Either the cartridges are plugged/dried out, or it hates Vista.

This printer’s best feature is that it has a built in 802.11g card.

The network connection to my secured wireless router was a snap. The printer has a touch screen that allows you to choose which network you want to connect to, and an alpha-numeric feature for entering the encryption key.
(When you create an encryption key always keep a copy in plain text, encrypted or hidden, for installations like this.)

When setting up the software in Vista I let the cd autorun and accepted the defaults, but it didn’t install properly. I had to uninstall and then reinstall by exploring the cd, right clicking the setup.exe and choosing run as administrator.

Between Vista’s continually asking for permission to do something and my added security, running installation software gets to be a pita.

Now that it’s running I have discovered that regardless what HP says about ppm. This printer is slow, the quality and colors are good, but less that perfect.
Having said this. I would still recommend it. The price was only $149 at Office Depot and I’m sure it could be found a few dollars cheaper online.
The speed, quality and color are well within tolerance for an amateur like myself. After all, this is a home unit, not something you would be using for the brochure to promote your next gallery showing.

The only other thing you need is patients. The initial printer alignment takes nearly 5 minutes.
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All in all, things are going smoothly in my transition to Vista, but then again I’m being very careful about the products I use.

While there remains no way to use this machine in the mixed software and hardware of my work environment. At home, using it for Paintshop X2 and Photoshop it runs fine… So far.

As a side note:
If you have a Samsung monitor, Adobe will say that the monitor profile is corrupted. It’s not. It’s just Adobe and Samsung refusing to play nice together.
I switched to the Adobe RGB profile and everything seems to be fine.